A first collection from Lordan (August Heat, 1989) is an uneven gathering of six linked stories (some of them appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in the ’80s) and a blistering title novella that’s one of the finest works of its kind since Tillie Olsen’s classic “Tell Me a Riddle” (which it substantially resembles). The stories explore with carefully restrained empathy the buried intellectual and even visionary dimensions of the stunted lives of rustic midwesterners (most of whom live in the town of Clayborne). Several characters keep reappearing in such tales as “The Cow Story” (about the eccentric behavior of bachelor Byron Doatze’s cow as a tornado approaches—and about Byron’s own uncharacteristic bravado in the company of Clayborne’s feisty spinster librarian) and “The Dummy,” a beautiful tale about a runaway mute boy whose intuitive fixation on a ventriloquist’s doll likewise resembles, and mocks, Byron’s failure to escape his self-imposed emotional shell. There’s more than a whiff of Winesburg, Ohio in highly charged pieces like “The Snake” (a long-suffering housewife’s “heroism” challenges her husband’s lost control over the family’s destiny) and “The Widow” (told by a ghost who remains in her house watching, and marveling at, the ’splendors” exhibited by the taciturn husband she thought she knew). Two other stories, “Running Out” and “Old Clayborne Trail,” are inchoate—but then there’s “And Both Shall Row”: a novella about two elderly sisters, Margaret and May White, who live together in passive contentment, years after the death of the man they both had married in turn. The consequences of a disabling stroke suffered by May (who nevertheless narrates the story, in a triumph of technical dexterity) and of Margaret’s stoical response to her daughter’s “arrangement” of their fates are stunningly delineated in a story that just builds and builds to its heartstopping climax. A bit of a patchwork, but with brilliant work included.
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18682-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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